Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart

by Lynn Schooler

  I unzipped the door of the tent and rolled over onto my belly, propping my chin on my fists, to listen, but I heard nothing more. Wolves, too, mate for life, and this pair seemed to have said what they needed to say and moved on.

  After a few minutes I zipped the door closed and nestled down into my sleeping bag. The beauty of spring is that it allows us to hope. Maybe when I got home, everything would be okay.

  Chapter 18

  I Slept Like a milk-drunk baby and was jerked half awake by a roar. Part of my brain was shouting, “Bear!” and telling me to grab the pepper spray while another piece was shouting, “Don’t!” at the hand scrambling to unzip the tent flap. The sound was gone before I could do either.

  I froze, stupefied and groggy, wondering if I had dreamed it. I was just starting to breathe again when the noise started over, this time coming with a rush that sounded like the beat of a helicopter wing or something huge and panting running past the tent—and again it was over before I had time to fully panic. Mystified, I fumbled with the zipper, threw back the tent flap, and crawled out on my hands and knees just in time to see a trumpeter swan skim down the creek and flap hard as it rose up the bank, passing a few feet overhead. The noise was the sound of seven-foot wings slicing the air. The bird was so close I could see every detail of its feathers and feel the pulsing beat of the wings. As surprised by my sudden appearance as I was by the swan’s, it banked hard to avoid me, flapped once or twice to right itself, and sped off in pursuit of its companions.

  The sun was up, but the tent was still in the shadow of the trees and covered with a thin layer of frost, so I crawled back inside and looked at my watch; I had slept only four hours, but the rush of being snatched so abruptly awake prevented me from going back to sleep. I realized that although I had seen swans every spring for decades, it had always been from a distance, and I had never once considered what they might sound like in flight or thought about the power required to push North America’s heaviest bird through the air. (Imagine placing a forty-pound sack of flour on top of a large fan, then try to imagine how hard the fan would have to blow to lift the bag off the ground. The aerodynamics are different, but the tremendous thrust required would have accounted for the roar I had heard.) Then I wondered what it must be like for the swans themselves to fly with such a sound in their ears, what other birds hear when a flock of forty or fifty swans goes by, and whether it is a relief to the swans when they settle to the ground and silence returns. Is it like shutting off a jackhammer or a noisy power tool? I really had no idea. Then I wondered what else I was missing, what more must be right before my eyes every day that I do not see.

  It was too much to think about before having morning coffee, so I crawled out of the tent and hurried into my clothes, blowing on my hands to warm them as I retrieved the food bag from its tree and set up the stove. While I waited for the water to boil, I dug the handheld radio out of the pack, switched on the power, and rotated the dial to the weather channel. The broadcast was so faint I had to hold the radio to my ear to interpret the scratchy voice fading in and out against a background of static. While I listened, the upper limb of the morning sun rose above the trees, lit up the surf, and spread a slow carpet of light up the beach. The day was clear, but a pale haze blurred the western sky. The weather forecast called for southwest winds to twenty knots with rain.

  After the water boiled, I carried a mug of coffee down to the sun and sat on a log to drink it. I was stiff from sleeping on the ground and mildly sore all over. I fired up the stove again for a second cup, but realized I missed the smell of coffee burping out of a pot onto the embers of a fire. Then I began to wonder if this, too, was a sign of middle age, a warning that I was in danger of becoming stuck in some bygone “good old days” when everything was somehow better, or at least more tolerable, if for no other reason than that using my body hard and sleeping on something other than a soft mattress did not lead to pain.

  The haze in the western sky turned gray and began crawling north in the time it took to boil water and prepare another freeze-dried meal—scrambled eggs this time, with flakes of something red and chewy that might have been peppers and others that could have been ham—and while I ate, I decided not to look for the Nelsons’ cabin. Ornithologists studying the crane population in Southeast Alaska recently decided there may be a very small population that nests somewhere in the archipelago, and although no nests have been found, I did not want to disturb the dancers I had seen if they were such a pair. Plus, the thought of walking on Severts’s bones or those of his victim while poking around looking for the remains of a hut that had probably been absorbed by the rainforest long ago seemed macabre.

  By the time I finished eating, the frost on the tent had melted into a layer of tiny drops, so I picked it up and shook it before carrying it fully assembled down into the sun to dry while I packed. In truth, I thought, I should be grateful that the “good old days” of canvas tents and wool long johns were past, because the high-tech raincoat and rainpants I had in my pack and the synthetic clothes I was wearing were going to get me through the wind and rain that was coming in relative comfort.

  The rain came an hour after I started walking, first as a fine mist that settled on my face and hands like cobwebs, then as steady pelting drops that gathered on the bill of my hat and hung there until they grew fat enough to fall. Hard on the heels of the rain came the wind. Knots of shorebirds fluttered past in groups of five to a dozen, skittering north on their way to the mudflats at the mouth of the Alsek River. From there they would fly on to the immense, rich delta of the Copper River, up on the eastern edge of Prince William Sound, to feed and fatten in groups of as many as a quarter of a million per square mile. After a series of gusts that flapped the sleeves of my raincoat and lashed at the tops of the trees, the wind settled into a stiff but steady breeze.

  A mile later I was growing chilled from the wind, and rain was starting to soak down my collar, so I pushed into the timber until I came to a game trail running parallel to the beach and then kept walking out of the wind and beyond the roar of the surf. The loudest sound was my own breathing. A branch breaking underfoot sounded like a rifle shot. Only by listening carefully could I make out the hiss of rain trickling through the canopy. The mossy trail was largely silent beneath my boots.

  At the base of a tree larger than the rest I unbuckled the pack and let it slide to the ground, unstrapped the bundled kayak, and pulled the tarp from the pack, followed by the stove and a pot. Behind the tree the ground was scabbed with patches of dirty snow, so I scooped off the top layer to clean it of twigs and needles, then filled the pot and put it on the stove to heat while I lashed the tarp to a branch for a lean-to. When I pulled the lines taut, the patter of rain on the tarp drummed a light tattoo.

  Heedless of the damp moss, I stretched out under the tarp in my rain gear and blew on the tea to cool it, then leaned back and drank it. After the cup was empty, with the warmth of the tea in my veins, I put my hat over my face and took a nap.

  I do not know how long I dozed—perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour—but it was long enough for the chill to creep back in, and I woke up hugging myself, although even then I continued to lie there for a minute to revel in the fact that I had no schedule to keep. At that moment I was as free as it is possible to be in the modern world. Loosed from even the normal constraints of day and night by the length of daylight at that latitude, all I had to do at that moment—or the next or the next—was whatever I wanted. Time itself was unmoored—or was until I started to shiver; I could continue to revel in my freedom or I could be warm, so I shook the rain off the tarp, folded it, packed it, shouldered my load, and started moving.

  The trail ran between corridors of trees with trunks like weight lifters’ thighs, grew faint, passed under branches so low I had to stoop to get by, then grew wide and distinct again beyond the next copse of trees. In places it appeared as a row of staggered holes, where for years every passing grizzly had stepped precisely into the
track of every other bear that had ever preceded it, regardless of size or length of stride, until the ground had been worn into a dotted line of depressions. Why grizzlies walk so faithfully in the steps of their ancestors in some places but not in others is a mystery. No other animal I am familiar with does anything similar.

  By afternoon the wind was easing, and I veered toward the beach, pushing through a chest-high stand of last year’s wild parsnip. The brittle stems crackled like a brushfire, frightening a dozen sparrows into the air. Offshore, beneath a clearing sky, the sea was green, rising and falling back on itself.

  After the quiet of the forest trail, coming back out into the open was like walking into a crowded party. Black-headed Bonaparte’s gulls dove at the waves, chattering in angry voices; a pair of eagles drifted in a lazy helix overhead; within a mile I crossed the tracks of a mink and a bear. At a point bisected by a rib of black rock a flock of sandpipers and dunlins sped by, followed by a few turnstones and a plover.

  The mind has a way of linking random moments so quickly that at times life becomes a tapestry of memories and reminders that can overrule reality; something as commonplace as a single note of song or a smell can snatch us up from where we are and drop us down somewhere else, which is what the sight of the plover did for me, by whisking me off the cold, rain-washed beach in Alaska and onto a strand of sun-warmed beach in Hawaii, where I had last seen a plover.

  In the Hawaiian language the name of the delicately patterned, gold-tinged shorebird is kolea, a somewhat derogatory term for “one who takes and leaves,” after the bird’s habit of arriving hungry in the fall and leaving as soon as it grows fat. Pluvialis fulva, the Pacific golden plover, spends the winter flitting along tropical beaches and chasing bugs across golf courses, until March, when the males begin exchanging their winter plumage for a wild ensemble of sweeping black and white curves that flow from their heads down their breasts and shoulders, giving them an appearance as formal and dramatic as that of the protagonist in an Italian opera. In April males and females alike leave the beaches to gather in grassy meadows 9,000 feet up on the shoulder of Mauna Kea volcano, where they wait until it is time to launch en masse, spiraling higher and higher above the island on the thermals rising from the volcano until they reach the jet stream at 20,000 feet and shoot north for Alaska. Three days and 2,500 nonstop miles later the survivors of the grueling marathon flutter to a landing among glaciers and grizzlies.

  The plover I saw in Hawaii had not started to change plumage yet. It was February, and my wife and I had boarded a jet four days earlier to head south along the plover’s track in reverse. We had ten days to rest and, I hoped, enjoy each other’s company. Before our departure I had worked so late one night laying a fine, buckwheat-colored wool carpet in the upstairs bedroom that after unbuckling my tool belt and lying down on the floor to rest my back a minute, I had fallen asleep and not woken up for two hours. She did not come home until ten P.M.

  Standing there with the weight of the pack on my back and a light sprinkle of rain in my face, watching the plover needle among the rocks, I remembered the plover in Hawaii darting back and forth along the edge of the gentle blue surf surging ashore on the beach where we were lying. The sand was warm, and when I leaned over to kiss her, she smelled like tanning oil. For four days we had hiked, napped, snorkeled, gone to bed early, and slept in. On Valentine’s Day, there was a table for two at a posh restaurant, complete with candlelight, a rose, and fresh tuna.

  “I’ve had enough,” she said that night as we crawled into bed. “I’m ready to go home.” Stunned, I said something angry to cover my hurt and surprise. We were halfway through the vacation.

  “I’ve got responsibilities” was her only answer. “I’d rather not be here.”

  The plover shot into the air and sped away. Once in the Arctic it would stand guard while its mate laid four eggs in a down-lined depression, then incubate them while she fed ceaselessly to build up enough fat for the southward migration.

  I realized my shoulders were aching. Maybe I had not tried hard enough in Hawaii. Maybe I could have done something differently. In the end, she had not returned to Alaska, but the rest of our days on the island had been tense and unenjoyable.

  I watched the plover disappear in the distance, wondering if I should turn around and head home again. Maybe we could fix things up, talk our problems over before the damage became irreparable. Then I remembered how she had not seemed to care that I was leaving on the trek or even known where I was going; how she no longer spoke of “we” or “us”; how she had stopped asking how my day had been and how noncommittal she had become when I asked about hers.

  The wind grew colder. I looked down the beach toward Lituya, then north to Cape Fairweather. It was gray and raining in both directions. I shifted the pack on my shoulders, tightened the hip belt to take the weight, and started up the beach after the plover.

  Chapter 19

  It was High tide, and the surf was surging into the slough three miles south of Cape Fairweather. I had seen four more bears since leaving the forest and going back to the beach, including two balls of fur that had followed their mother out into the open a quarter of a mile behind me, then an immense creature with a waddle like a football player’s who had eased out of sight when he had seen me. I wondered if the sow and two cubs had stood in the brush watching me go by, or if it was simply a matter of luck and timing that had brought them to the beach so soon after I had passed. I had hiked inland up the slough for a half mile or so, thinking I might find a shallow spot to cross, but the banks were steep and undercut in places by rushing water. After finding several sets of grizzly tracks in the mud and a deeply worn trail along the bank, I had grown leery of the thick brush and turned around.

  The Tlingit name for the area around the slough is Dzix’Ayi, meaning “steep waterfall,” but there was nothing in sight that fit that description. This did not surprise me; Fairweather Glacier has been shrinking for years, the slough has expanded, and in places brush and trees had sprung up so thick in the wake of the receding glacier that the growth seemed literally impenetrable. Steep Waterfall was an ancient name, and it was entirely possible that when the Tlingit had first settled the coast during the tail end of the Ice Age, the glacier had been enormous, reaching all the way to tidewater as a wall of ice veined with cataracts of meltwater hundreds of feet high.

  Walking up the slough, I had come across a low, shattered stump that I thought indicated how tremendously and often the cape had changed. Larger in diameter than any living trees in the area, the gray, knee-high trunk poking up from the mud was a remnant of an ancient forest, buried until recently under the glacier. Thousands of years ago, at the start of the Ice Age, torrents of sand and gravel washing down the sides of the glacier had inundated the base of the trees ahead of the surging ice. Then the glacier had slid forward on top of the gravel, shearing off the trees as it had progressed. The remaining interstadial* stumps had been preserved in an oxygen-free environment beneath millions of tons of ice until the glacier had receded.

  Neither fossilized nor petrified, the stump was indistinguishable from contemporary driftwood except for a peculiarly smooth, almost waxy feel to its surface and some delamination between its growth rings. Interstadial wood discovered along the banks of a river draining from a glacier near Juneau has been carbon-dated at 2,500 years old. An interstadial “forest” in Glacier Bay dates back approximately 7,000 years, and a root wad found on the southern shore of Lituya Bay was dated at 9,000. When I scuffed a wrist-sized root free of sand and mud with the toe of my boot and tapped it, it felt solid, even though it might have been a sapling when humans were just starting to develop agriculture.

  With the tide high, the slough was too deep and wide to cross without inflating the kayak, and it was late, so I dropped back down to the mouth and set up camp. After putting up the tent, I went to work gathering driftwood for a fire and using a small saw to cut a spindly log into arm-sized chunks. The “saw”—a thin fl
exible finely toothed wire with a steel ring at each end—was slow but patiently effective when pulled back and forth like a shoe-shine rag across the silver surface. The dry wood in the center would make starting a fire after a day of pounding rain easier.

  I had been carrying the saw for over thirty years, long enough for the oil of my fingers to have burnished the steel rings, and using it gave me time to think about the interstadial wood, about the aeons that had passed since the tree had sprouted, grown, been covered over with ice, preserved, and uncovered—and about how its decay was inevitable now that it had been exposed to the atmosphere. Rot would set in, and after it had survived intact for thousands of years, the minerals and nutrients locked in the ancient cells of the stump would be set loose to be absorbed by the roots of the grasses, sedges, alders, and spruce saplings rimming the slough, rejoining the cycle of living growth and decay.

  The vast expanse of time involved made a human life seem so short and fleeting that after carrying the sectioned log back to camp, I dug into the pack for the Buddhist prayer flag Luisa had given me, spread it on a large drift log beside the tent, and weighed it down with a stone. While I split the dry heart out of a piece of firewood with a knife, kindled it into a pile of splinters and shavings, and touched a match to it, I thought about going back up the slough in the morning to cut a section from the interstadial stump’s root. Perhaps a piece large enough to slice into a drawer front for the tokonoma cabinet I planned to build using the mesquite wood salvaged from my family’s ancestral ranch and the three-hundred-year-old hemlock I had cut down while putting in the foundation of the house. Then I decided against it. The stump was bound to decay, or might even be washed away by a spring flood or covered with mud, but cutting into it would feel like a violation of some sort, like plucking a stalactite from an unexplored cave for a keepsake.